Component testing plays an important role during the manufacture and assembly of hard drives. Testing individual components allows the manufacturer to determine whether specifications of a new design have been met prior to incorporating the new component into a fully assembled hard drive. Testing representative component samples provides a measure of quality control that may prevent the wasteful assembly of a large number of hard drives using a faulty batch of components. However, many conventional hard drive component testing systems fail to create a testing environment similar to that experienced by components in an operating hard drive. Accordingly, these conventional systems are limited in the number and range of parameters that can be tested before the component is incorporated into a working hard drive.
Conventional testing systems typically are expensive and relatively complex systems. Conventional testing systems may cost several hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of dollars to purchase and maintain. This expense limits the number of testing systems a manufacturer can purchase given a limited budget, which correspondingly limits the number of components that can be tested within a given time frame. Many conventional component testing systems are complex pieces of equipment requiring special training and/or special tools to set up and operate. This complexity limits the efficiency and increases the overall costs associated with operating and maintaining the systems.